If his tweets were any indication, Michelangelo Signorile dedicated his entire radio show yesterday to the question of Cynthia Nixon’s sexuality.
That’s weird.
It’s true that the public loves a good riff on some variation of the is-she-or-isn’t-she question, but in this case, we know. Cynthia Nixon is gay. She has a girlfriend. She isn’t hiding anything or campaigning against gay rights or donating millions of dollars to the Mormon church to help defeat same-sex marriage. The how or why is better left to the scientists, but the what — that she is an out lesbian woman — is well established.
Amateur biologists that we are, however, many of us just couldn’t resist taking the bait when Nixon gave an interview in which she asserted that “for me, [my sexuality] is a choice. I understand that for many people it’s not, but for me it’s a choice, and you don’t get to define my gayness for me.” Of course, that didn’t stop Signorile’s followers on Twitter (and others) from doing just that, dismissing the comment as a byproduct of misguided bisexuality, using it to illustrate “another example of the difference between gay men and lesbians,” or just chalking it up to the very male perception that “women are allowed to be more sexually open in our culture.” (Really?) Incredibly, only a few people — all women, it seems — actually gave unconditional credence to the notion that Cynthia Nixon has a right to define her own experience, even when it appears to threaten everything we believe about ourselves.
First, the obvious. Cynthia Nixon “knows” that her being gay is a choice in the same way that I “know” my being gay is an inborn trait. We just feel it. Of course, sheer introspection is not a sound epistemological method by any stretch — for either of us! — but in lieu of a credible and falsifiable explanation, it’s all we have. So in this case, it’s not even a situation of respectful disagreement, but personal truth: Nixon is not telling me that I chose to be gay, but that she did. I can’t possibly know whether or not that is true because I do not inhabit Cynthia Nixon’s body and mind.
I can, however, think about choice and freewill and the fact that we are a species famous for claiming categorical agency when we have none. For example, most of us don’t ever question the moment we “chose” to be right-handed or left-handed, but this predicament was actually one of my childhood’s most pressing questions. I practiced writing left-handed for years, I mimicked certain left-handed affectations that I’d see on television or elsewhere, I even started wearing a watch on my right hand. I heard about this thing called ambidextrousness — supposedly my grandmother had it — and I thought maybe that was me, too. At one point, I realized that my handwriting as a lefty actually got pretty good! But in the end, I “decided” that it felt more natural for me to be a righty. Just like Nixon, who said, “I’ve been straight and I’ve been gay, and gay is better,” I tried righty and I tried lefty, and righty is better. As far as I was concerned, I made that choice, and there was nothing you could have told the 14-year-old me to convince him otherwise. It was as obvious to me as the fact that Knightwatch was going to become legendary television. (It didn’t.)
I realize now that it’s more complicated than that. That even if there is a “choice” involved, it’s not one of unmitigated freewill, and that — as with most of, if not all of the major markers that we use to construct identity — there is also some sort of genetic influence or predisposition. But what if there isn’t?
It seems obvious that the row over Nixon’s comments go way beyond personal truth and more into the thorny territory between social perception and civil rights: If “they” think we choose our sexuality, some argue, gay people will never be free from discrimination and oppression. But considering that the lack of choice that went into my identity as a person of color failed to provide any such immunity from the discrimination and oppression of being Hispanic or nonwhite in America, I struggle to see the logic (or dignity) in such a fear. At its worst, this argument proposes that a pure biological basis for homosexuality is the only escape-hatch from the moral argument against LGBT people, and in turn, submits that without this basis, there may be something to that moral argument in the first place. But there isn’t. Let’s not forget that the rhetoric of an “innate nature” is historically fraught with ideological self-interest, and that this point is not exclusive to a queer context: Late nineteenth-century theorists, for example, “presented the nonwhite person — ‘the savage’ — as lower down the evolutionary scale than the white” in an attempt to perpetuate a myth about the sexual insatiability of non-Europeans and to curb “the threat they consequently pose for the purity of the white race.” (If this sounds familiar, consider Pat Robertson’s recent warning that “there isn’t one single civilization that has survived that openly embraced homosexuality,” and that “if history is any guide, the same thing is going to happen to us.”) Still, at its core, this fear also enforces the wrongful assertion that nature operates in clean divisions of inborn and acquired traits, and totally disregards those evolutionary certainties that factually exist in-between the binaries — such as the way many “plants and animals are hermaphroditic before they are bisexual and are bisexual before they are heterosexual” or how “bees and flowers coevolve through mutually beneficial ‘deviations.’” (Timothy Morton can speak more about this point.) In other words, by placing a caveat-free premium on innate sexuality, gay people are actually making the same argument they are being oppressed with — that there are certain immutable “natural” binaries that exist for human beings in a way that defies the reality of pretty much every other plant and animal species on the planet. By yielding to such exceptionalism, we are clamoring to squeeze human sexuality and gender expression into a rigid box that we invented, which as such, enjoys no right to an existence in perpetuity.
The other thing, then, is this: Without any sort of real epistemic evidence for nature or nurture or neither, gay people ask straight people for the right to define our own experience every single day — even when it appears to threaten everything heterosexuals believe about themselves. Straight people certainly can’t imagine what it’s like to grow up gay, and many of the less sophisticated in their ranks can’t even imagine the possibility that two men or two women can love each other with the same kind of affection, desire, and commitment that they enjoy with their opposite-sex partners. Similarly, I have no idea what it must feel like to grow up with common, uncomplicated worries — such as whether or not a girl I like thinks I’m cute — and without attaching the fears of sin, morality, impending antigay violence, mental illness, and total ruin to every basic boyhood crush. Until we figure out how to inhabit the bodies and minds of other people, we might never know these things of each other.
Which is to say that, as improbable as Cynthia Nixon’s claim plays out in my own experience, I have no choice but to afford her the same benefit of the doubt that I demand for my own personal truth, which persists, unaffected. I mean, I believe I was born this way. But there is nothing about my personhood that would change if I weren’t.
YES
I didn’t read the whole of this but it’s simple and not long. Homosexuality is not a choice because a man cannot help but love another man nor can a woman help love another woman. The same with bisexuality and heterosexuality. People can choose who they have sex with but not who they love or lust over (a straight man would not lust over another man). Nixon is bisexual and not gay if she felt that she was in love with her ex and is now in love with her current partner. It is an outrage that anyone believes how we feel is a choice. And any side of that argument whether someone says homosexuality is a choice or heterosexuality is a choice we should all be up in arms about! I can’t help the way I feel, nor can anybody else!
